Sunday, June 30, 2013

I know I say this every month but seriously there were a lot of changes that I sometimes couldn't keep track of it. Frankly, I couldn't anticipate what to write about until the very last day. For instance, I purchased a new set of Maxspect Razor Nano LED lights for tank 2 and swopped the Green Element 60W LED lights from tank 2 to tank 1 about 2 weeks back. Since then, I had been getting massive cyanobacteria and some black algae bloom in tank 1. I suspect this was due to the increased light intensity from the new lights and accumulated nutrients from my lack of water changes. Despite my efforts of putting in a new pack of ROWAphos and scrubbing the cyanobacteria and strange black algae covering the corals daily, they kept coming back day after day because the nutrients were not exported out. I have nothing against Golden Octopus but I swear that the black algae all appeared from the coral frags that I bought from them previously. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and changed at least 90% of the water this morning. Hopefully, the algae will not grow back with such ferocity that almost made me decide to decommission this tank. With the Green Element lights for tank 1, the only good thing that came out of it was a green tipped Acropora sps that browned out under the older lights started to look more green and the tips started to grow. Another sad thing that I observed was that with any new fishes that I add, I seemed to lose some others. It didn't occur to me that my Hector's Goby and Six Line Wrasse were missing for days until recently. In fact, I had a beautiful Black Foot Maldive Clown for a couple of days before it disappeared into thin air. None of their bodies were ever found, which made me wonder if my recovering Bubble Coral swallowed all of them. Of course I am happy that it seemed to recover gradually but I had no proof to confirm that it ate up the missing fishes. Now there are only 3 Clown Fish and 1 Strawberry Dottyback and I will just let it stay that way for now.For tank 2, the phosphate problems finally went away after I did the following: transferred my Two Little Fishes Phosban Reactor that I run NP biopellets back home, dosed the Brightwell Aquatics Reef BioFuel daily and added a new TLF Phosban Reactor with PhosBan. The main livestock changes that occurred in this tank were I added quite a number of fishes, sps, Zoas and some invertebrates. The Zoas are doing well, except for one of my favourites Blue Ensign that toppled into the Elegance Coral and sort of melted away. The pink digitata was originally doing very well but it deteriorated gradually with the base turning white. I suspected it was due to the close proximity with the Elegance Coral and I transferred the latter to tank 1 since I do not want to jeopardize any more sps and Zoas. The two Sea Fans that I added are beautiful and I hope they stay that way. As for the new lights, I am kind of disappointed to note that I did not see any significant changes to the growth or colour of all the sps and other corals in the tank ever since the Maxspect was added. I am planning to replace the internal Tunze skimmer with an external one to make more space for the existing corals. All the new fishes are doing well except for the disappearance of a small Royal Gramma Basslet that was only seen hiding amongst the rockworks and never ventured out into the open waters.Anyway, the updates on the 2 aquariums are as follows although my camera failed to capture the photographic quality that would do justice to the actual thing:Tank 1 (1 ft cube - 27 litres)The list of livestock is as follows:

Fishes

3 Clown Fish (Candy, Cindy and Cynthia)

1 Six Line Wrasse (Wendy)

1 Purple Dottyback (Pauline)

Invertebrates

3 Pom Pom Crabs (Penelope, Phoebe and Phyllis)

1 red Hermit Crab (from tank 2)

4 Turbo Snails

1 Nassarius Snail

1 red Coco-worm (Coco)

1 small (yellow) and 1 big (brown) Feather Duster Worms

Corals

SPS

1 green tipped Acropora

LPS

1 pink Sun Coral - dying since the algae bloom

1 Bubble Coral - recovering

1 brown Elegance Coral (transferred to office)

1 cream Elegance Coral (from tank 2)

1 pink Hammer Coral (from tank 2)

1 green Frogspawn Coral (from tank 2)

Mushrooms

1 plate of blue Actinodiscus mushrooms

1 plate of Ricordea mushrooms

1 orange Ricordea yuma mushroom

Soft Corals

1 Rose Tip Bubble Anemone

1 Chili Coral

1 Leather Coral

Polyps

1 piece of Green Star Polyps and 1 mat of GSP

2 frags of green Palm Tree Coral

1 fluorescentGoniopora with pink eye (It still has not opened)

1 brown Goniopora (transferred to office tank)

1 rock of brown Daisy (Clove) Polyps

1 green Palythoa

1 frag of green Zoas

1 Rasta (6) & Sunflower (1) Zoas

Macroalgae

1 rock of red bamboo macroalgae

1 plate of red wavy macroalgae (Ulva)

2 clumps of red branched macroalgae

a strand of green Caulerpa from office tank

The casualties are:

1 Hector's Goby (Hector) - It went missing for days now and I fear it's dead.

1 Six Line Wrasse (Wendy) - As above.

1 Blue Neon Goby (Bernard) - As above. It disappeared at the same time and their bodies were never found.

1 black foot Maldives Clown Fish - It suddenly disappeared after doing well for some time.

1 red and white Cleaner Shrimp - I found it dead on the morning of 23 Jun 13 and had no idea why it died.

1 red and white Pistol Shrimp (Paul) - It didn't make an appearance for some time now.

1 red Acan - I threw it away because it didn't seem to recover for so long now.

1 plate of red Actinodiscus mushroom - I threw it away because it was badly bleached.

1 Nassarius snail

1 small yellow Cucumber - I threw it away by accident together with the mushroom.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

I was wondering what happened to Yogi the Yellow Wrasse the other day because I hadn't seen it these few days when I found a dried corpse of it on my desktop table. It was between a few boxes and the desiccated body reminded me of ikan bilis.Before all these, I was actually thinking of how I can catch Yogi and move him to my office tank to make way for other surprises but sadly, there is no such need now.

my G@Rdening frenzY

About Me

This blog was created as an online diary to capture some of the things I love or experience in life. Anyway, I hope we will all learn to appreciate the simple things in life, cherish our loved ones and make the most of our lives.